Ignore my boot partition it is a red herring, I was playing about and thought it might be useful - NOT. It will be removed when I get around to rationalising the system again.

Grub2 should find all the existing OS's and offer you a menu to select which you want. If you want a fancy boot loader then look at Super-Boot-Manager  (http://www.sourceslist.eu)

See my attachment for my "grub" screen. (Using burg and showing all 4 OS's installed)

Nope, it doesn't need it.

I have finally got stuck into trying to boot Mint11 into laptop. I have deleted the little HP  partition (well backed-up) using the Win 7 facility, I notice that the partition is still there but labelled "unallocated". Should it be removed altogether? If so, how?? Win7 does not seem to notice so far.
I have tried the Mint 64 bit disk and it seemed to go through all the motions and loaded some files with a lot of disk-work after the Mint opening page saying that it will restart in n seconds. Eventually the screen went black and stayed like it. Subsequently I have tried the 32 bit variety and, in desperation, the Linux Format DVD all to no avail. Of course the BIOS is set to DVD Drive first as required. Each time I opted for the "try it out first" method to run it from the disk. Would it be sensible to go for the "Install it now" option (a bit scary?)
When I was Ubuntuing I had no difficulties with re-installs at all, booting up as expected.

I must have missed something, or could it be a low trick of M$ to continue to make life difficult for us?

Words of comfort please!

OK it should have asked you where to put the install (which partition etc)

When you booted the disc, it would get to a desktop with INSTALL on it, did you double click on that?

That is fine.
Win 7 does not notice - the only time it would be used is by HP utilities which can reset everything back to the day you bought it.
Since the space is not used, it is available for allocation - but it's so tiny that I would just leave it as it is.

If you just booted from the live DVD to try out the system, it would not reboot unless you took the shutdown & restart  option, which you would only do if you had finished your current trial of Mint session.
It wouldn't use the disk either - although it would probably make excessive use of the DVD.

If you can't get an internet connection on the CD trial, you would want to do some investigation before installing.

How much RAM do you have - I found that Ubuntu used to act a bit funny in "only" 512MB...

There are some special startup options which may help - laptops have a lot of fancy power saving options, which may need to be disabled for the trial.
Couldn't tell you what they are though.

Make sure you put /home in its own partition when you eventually install.
(At this stage that may sound a bit cryptic)

Thanks Jeremy,

I have 4GB of RAM which is now usual with the HP Pavillion dv6 so that is not a problem. If you look back at earlier posts you will see that a separate /home is going to be a separate
partition. My concern was with the  remains of the HP partition that it might be still considered as the 4th  Basic partition and queer the pitch when trying to instal the Extended partition when I got to the gparted bit of the Mint installation.



It may be that I did not do the shut-down and restart as you suggest. This time I will not go along the "Try it" option but to the full instal one. I did expect that the trial one, working entirely from the Live disk, would behave like it did when playing with the various versions of Ubuntu on my old laptop. Slow of course but the opening pages appeared just if a full instal had been done. You seem to imply that it should do when I had "finished with my current trial of Mint session"  I never got that far!!

No more time to fiddle now,  SWMBO has organised lunch out !!!

Having or not having empty or otherwise partitions will have no effect on anything.
They are empty!


Correct!
I also said that you shouldn't try for a full install to your hard disk, if the trial from CD doesn't work.
Expect a full install to disk to ask for a single reboot part way through and don't interrupt it.